Commodity

The commodity is the star of the Chapter 1 show. Basically, a commodity is a good (an item) or a service that's produced in order to be exchanged (bought and sold). So, if you walk into a music store and look at all the guitars for sale, those goods are commodities. It's the same with services. If you waltz into a car repair shop and there's a chalkboard telling you all the things you can pay for them to do to your car, those services are commodities, too.

Marx starts off the book with a statement that the wealth of societies in capitalism appears as an immense collection of commodities (1.1.1). Essentially, he's saying that there are commodities all over the place in a capitalistic society. Capitalists have to profit, and the main way they do that is by selling commodities.

Now, it's a little strange that Marx says the wealth appears to be an immense collection of commodities—as opposed to is an immense collection of commodities. What he means is that commodities shouldn't necessarily be considered wealth, but that's how things appear under capitalism.

Then there's this business about the commodity being the elementary form of the capitalist mode of production, and how analysis should begin with it. (1.1.1-2). That just means that the commodity is Marx's foundational concept, along with the contradictions or oppositions it contains—between use-value and exchange value, for example, or between appearance and reality.

Yeah, so let's get a little deeper on that appearance and reality thing. What about the famous fetishism of the commodity, you ask? (We know you're asking.) Marx talks about this in section 4 of chapter 1. A fetish is an object someone invests with sexual meaning, even though it's not inherently sexual, such as women's shoes. So the fetishizer adds magical meaning that isn't really there.

Similarly, commodities take on exchange-values and represent the labor embodied in them as if by magic, since really, a commodity is just a physical object and doesn't inherently contain a price tag or a measurement of embodied human labor.

As Marx puts it: "[T]he commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labor within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. [...] I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities" (1.4.4).